


Sight Unseeing

by bonebo



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cancer, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-18 03:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonebo/pseuds/bonebo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death was what you heard, and isolation was what you faced. Twenty-two years of nothing, wasted nonetheless, all the places you hadn’t gone and the people you hadn’t kissed and the friends you hadn’t made.</p>
<p>But maybe it wasn't too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In retrospect, there had really been no way to see it coming.

Every morning you woke up, hobbled to the bathroom to bathe and get ready for the day--and it had taken a few weeks before you noticed that maybe your face hadn’t always been that narrow, maybe your hips used to have a bit more girth. You tilted your head in the mirror and studied the hint of rib that pressed against your chest, and you wondered at the changes in your body but passed them off as just that: changes. Completely natural. Maybe you were finally coming into yourself, becoming the person that twenty-two years had built up to.

You gradually found yourself eating less--but the fridge was full of uncooked meat and left-over Taco Bell, and the cabinets were stocked with cans of soup and messy piles of Shrimp ramen, and you even had enough of your shitty paycheck left over to be able to go to a restaurant to eat every now and again.

You just didn’t. 

Not that it bothered you--you still ate, occasionally. You certainly weren’t starving to death, and you didn’t even feel hungry. It was natural; weird, but natural. It had to be.

The jaundice was what made you first start to worry.

You didn’t even notice it, not really--you woke up late that morning, hadn’t much time to get ready before heading off to bust your ass in the thick-sweet air of Starbucks, and if something was off in your appearance you didn’t catch it as you hurried past the mirror and out the door.

But then you walked in, and your boss was the first one to storm over to you, eyes narrowed and you knew you were going to catch hell; but instead he stopped about a foot from you, face confused and ugly, and asked, “Eridan…are you feeling alright?”

You replied with an affirmative, you were a little tired but that was normal lately, probably stemming from long hours running fruitless blogs on Tumblr--why?

In response, he gave a vague motion to his eyes, then guided you to the bathroom to see for yourself--and see you did, and you stared, because what once was white was yellow, brown irises searching the mirror as they floated in a sea of gold. Your skin was no better, everything tinged yellow and your palms looked like they’d been coated in pollen, and at your boss’s direction you got right back into that shitty old car and hauled yourself straight to the hospital.

A few hours, a couple of tests, and a whopping fat bill to your insurance later, they gave you the diagnosis of cancer.

You laughed.

“What? No. I’m twenty-two--I’m young, I’m healthy. There’s no way.”

The doctor just pointed to the charts, drawing circles with his fingers around spots that were dark--they weren’t supposed to be dark, you didn’t think, you were too caught on the word ‘cancer’ to even follow his explanation--and said again how this was the stomach, this was the intestine, and this was the pancreas and that was the tumor.

In bedside manner, you gave him a zero out of ten, would not listen to again.

Then he explained the survival rate, twenty-four percent after one year, and as all the air in your body left you you realized that you probably wouldn’t even have the chance.

Pancreatic cancer, he said. You’ll need to be hospitalized, of course.

Death was what you heard, and isolation was what you faced. Twenty-two years of nothing, wasted nonetheless, all the places you hadn’t gone and the people you hadn’t kissed and the friends you hadn’t made.

Of course.


	2. Chapter 2

The day after, you thought it’d all been a dream.

You woke up to the same ceiling over your head and the same worn-soft purple sheets beneath you, the same old comforter kicked haphazardly over your lower half, and as you sat up you let out a relieved breath because that had been the scariest nightmare you’d had in a while. The most vivid, too.

But then you glanced down at your wrist and saw the band there, the white plastic with your name written upon it in a hasty script, and for a while all you could do was stare. 

But staring did nothing to make the wristband go away, did nothing to ease the pounding of your heart in your chest, nor the roar of blood in your ears; you had a fleeting desire to grab your phone, to call someone, anyone--

But who?

Your parents were both dead, courtesy of a drunken driver on a rainy road when you were nineteen, and they had never really introduced you to the rest of your family; you’d never been a social butterfly in high school, but moving halfway across the nation for college had severed the few ties of friendship that you’d had, and you lacked the will and ability to recreate them. The people you worked with were just as shitty as the job itself, blowhards that couldn’t care less about you--hell, they’d probably already found your replacement, by now.

So instead of calling a friend or venting to a family member, you just dropped your head back down to your pillows, covered it with your blanket, and let everything go. 

After all, if you cried then you cried, and the shadows on the walls were the only ones around to watch.

~~~

They’d moved you to the hospital shortly after that.

You got a room all your own in the terminal wing--of course they didn’t call it that around you, but your bed was right beside the door, you could hear the murmurs as they all walked by--and it even came equipped with a nice little TV set up in the top corner. The bed wasn’t bad, the sheets were almost soft; if it wasn’t for the constant humming noise of all the monitors around you and the needles stuck to your veins, you could almost pretend you were on a vacation in a cheap hotel.

Almost meaning, not really at all.

Especially not when the doctor came in, all somber and serious in the face as he sat down beside your bed, charts in his hands; he started to talk, giving you statistics and numbers and percentages, options that made your stomach churn. 

He told you that some ten percent of people diagnosed were able to have surgery to remove the tumor; with your advanced local disease, he explained, you were not part of that ten percent. Chemotherapy could boost your chances of survival, but even so, taking the radiation only made the percentages go from three percent after five years to thirteen. 

That left you with two options--take the chemotherapy, endure the sickness and baldness and fatigue to hopefully drag a few more months out of your soon-wretched life, or sit in a bed and wait to die.

You’d never been one for noble actions, instead always wondering why the knight would risk his life for some stupid bimbo too inept to leave her own fucking tower; and you were not, nor would ever be, any kind of prince. 

So it was with no shame, but a cold sense of finality, that you pushed away the papers for radiation. You turned your head away from the doctor’s pitying gaze and laid back on the bed, closing your eyes and trying to think of ways to spend the last ten months of your life.


End file.
